Research Paper on:
Ethics In Finance: Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
the technicalities of financial management (Dobson, 1997). Events such as stock market crashes and bank scandals have brought the subject of ethics to the forefront in the financial arena (Dobson,  1997). The recent scandals involving Salomon brothers, Enron, WorldCom, and Martha Stewart have further placed the ethics of financial business in the forefront of the publics mind as well as  in the consciousness of legislators and executives. People just dont trust executives of large corporations and they do not trust the auditors who are supposed to ensure corporations are on  the up-and-up. Dobson argues that the financial world must adopt and live by a code of ethics (1997). The case that will be explored in this essay is the Martha  Stewart scandal. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. provides hundreds of household products and the company has also expanded into publishing, television, direct mail, and a Web site (Hoovers, 2002). Martha  Stewart, Chairman and CEO, owns approximately 63 percent of the stock and the company controls almost all voting stock (Hoovers, 2002). Revenues for the nine months ending September 30, 2002  rose by six percent to $217.5M (CNN/Money, 2002). Stewart held just under four thousand shares of ImClone stock and on December 27, 2001, she sold 3,900 shares (CNN Money,  2002). That was the day before the FDA refused to review ImClones application for Erbitux, a new experimental drug for treating cancer (CNN Money, 2002). Federal investigators, i.e., the SEC,  began investigating Stewarts sale, trying to learn if anyone, such as Samuel Waksal, former ImClone CEO, tipped Stewart that the application was to be rejected (CNN Money, 2002). Waksal was  eventually arrested and charged with conspiracy, securities fraud and perjury in what they have called an insider trading scheme (CNN Money, 2002). Stewart has maintained that she had tried to